STALKER Performance Issues

CliffyG

CliffyG

CliffyG

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
17,870
Location
Cambridge
I had major problems with running STALKER on XP, so much so that it blue screened loads unless i dropped the settings to minimal and even then it was so jerky i couldn't play it. Since upgrading to Vista Ultimate i thought I'd give it a second chance though. To even get it barely playable I've had to drop the in game settings to low quality and the ati drivers set to high performance. I haven't had a blue screen and it is less jerky but as far as I'm concerned is still not playable. I just cant fathom how it performs like this, i know i don't have a great up to date setup but it's not that bad. Is it just badly coded junk or is there something terribly wrong with my setup? My spec is:

AMD X2 4200
1 Gig Geil 6400
ATI x1800xt
I have 2 decent'ish 7200 SATA disks with the swap file on it's own partition on a different disk from the O/S.

I can generally run OK at medium settings as minimum on all recent games so what is it about STALKER that is killing my system so much. Actually as i type this I've remembered that Broken Sword 4 also ran like a complete dog.
 
Ah no i only went up to 1.0001 (that was the only one out when i was trying on XP). I'll try updating it now.
 
It's quite amazing compared to how a below PC performed back in the late 90's. Low settings were just that - same game, low settings. They allowed a playable game where the graphics were not as good as they could be.

Now we have games that you need a monster PC to play for these low settings. Even then the game can be unplayable.

Stalker and Broken Sword are two fine examples, but there are so many more contenders. Sometimes I feel I'm buying a game, so I can play it next year.

Hopefully the patch you are downloading will sort things out. Be sure to post your results as I may just re-install the game myself.
 
The patch has made a difference, quite a noticable one when just walking around calmly. Unfortunately as soon as i start moving the mouse quickly it gets jerky and shooting at the same time caused a couple of pauses. I'm not playing it like that so it gets shelved till patch 4, not that i'm confident about that sorting it out either :mad:.
 
Only other thing i can think of is that you have FSAA forced in the drivers - although I would have thought catalyst AI would have taken care of turning it off for this title as thats part of what its meant to do , disable things on non-compatible games .
 
Try completely disabling shadows, if that can be tweaked. As in not even set to low, but set to no shadows at all.

Not sure if this is a Vista thing, but to play Lord of the Rings Online smoothly I have to alt tab to the desktop and set the CPU priority to High. Might make no difference at all on this game, but it makes LOTRO smooth as butter. Unfortunately I have to do this every time I play the game, but it's that or nothing.
 
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AA is set to application controlled when the theme is set to high performance so it isnt that.

I didn't notice any shadows when i played on low settings but will jump on later tonight and see. Alt-Tabbing from STALKER hangs the application 9/10 times so i don't think that will help lol.

Aye i know only 1gig is the bottleneck but i refuse to upgrade when pretty much every other games works fine.
 
RumbleBee said:
Try completely disabling shadows, if that can be tweaked. As in not even set to low, but set to no shadows at all.

Not sure if this is a Vista thing, but to play Lord of the Rings Online smoothly I have to alt tab to the desktop and set the CPU priority to High. Might make no difference at all on this game, but it makes LOTRO smooth as butter. Unfortunately I have to do this every time I play the game, but it's that or nothing.
Click to expand...

You can probably alter the target line to include that no?
 
yep. if the OP goes to TWEAKGUIDE he can see how.
you just add to the target line -noshadows -noprefetch -nointro
if you want a boost.
(i think thats right but go to tweakguide and check).
 
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